Ms. Durkawi researches in the area of Romantic poetry, particularly the manner in which the concept of nature, within a specific locale, is portrayed in the writing of eighteenth and early nineteenth century poets, particularly Wordsworth and Walter Scott.

Ms. Durkawi is interested in the Romantic reception of Eastern and Middle Eastern thought, from Herder through Wordsworth and Emerson to Khalil Gibran, one of the last of the Romantics. In addition, she researches comparative literature, the intersection of European and Arab modernism in the works of Gibran and Nizar Qabbani, and the intersection of modernist and Eastern thought in the works of Hermann Hesse.

Selected Publications

Ms. Durkawi is currently working on a psychological novel investigating questions of identity; the knowledge of self and its motivations, and the impingement of outer events on these; personal freedom and responsibility; the sense of home; and integration within a group of foreign students who come to the West together to further their academic careers. Part of the group decides to go back home, while the rest decide to establish an alternative permanent home in the West.